Martin Heydon (Kildare South, Fine Gael)

I did not say that. The Deputy should not attribute comments to me about staffing issues. I have been very clear here; we have had a very significant challenge with processing and working through all of these issues. Some farmers were not paid on time. When I came into this job on 23 January, 14,500 farmers who were due to be paid had not been paid because of challenges we had in processing their applications. That was not acceptable to me. It is still not acceptable to me that there is a couple of percent of farmers left unpaid. However, the progress we have made from 14,5000 farmers unpaid when I started this job less than six months ago to getting that down to 1,586 farmers, of whom 514 within that number are from 2023 so they are counted twice in that measure, is significant.

We have made very significant changes to our structures in Johnstown Castle. We have brought about a number of changes in how we process these. I have put extra resources in there from a departmental perspective to get those farmers paid with the promise that these challenges would not recur. The resolutions we found to these problems took time because we did it in a systematic way and dealt with the cohorts group by group and designed the IT functionality around that, so that this problem would not recur every year and that we could restore confidence in this really exceptional scheme that has put more than €500 million into farmers' pockets.

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